Computer Science News

A £3.5 million supercomputing hub is set to power growth and innovation in the Midlands and London by opening up its vast number-crunching power to local firms.

The University of Warwick is leading a group of four top universities to launch MidPlus, a state-of-the–art high-performance computing centre, to help SMEs and larger firms with the modelling, simulation and analysis needed to design world-leading products and services.

MidPlus will provide extra computing capacity to sectors such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical and advanced materials as well as delivering supercomputing skills to the local workforce.

The investment consists of £2 million from the research funding agency EPSRC and £1.5 million from the four partners – University of Warwick, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham and Queen Mary, University of London.

The move is linked to a Government drive to increase the UK’s capacity to exploit high-performance computing in optimising process design – a key requirement to boost industries such as advanced manufacturing, scientific research and financial services.

You can get more information, inclduing commentary from its director, on the initiative here.

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick invites applications from candidates who are enthusiastic about enhancing the teaching and appreciation of Computer Science in UK schools and colleges, with excellent communication skills and the ability to contribute to teaching activities in the Department of Computer Science.

Candidates must be committed to widening participation in science, and appreciate the changing profile of Computer Science in UK schools and colleges. Candidates must also be comfortable liaising and coordinating with representatives from departments across the Faculty of Science, the University, schools and colleges, employers and the local community.

To apply, please follow the instructions available on the official University web-page.

Please quote job vacancy reference number 71910-052.

The closing date/time for applications is midnight (British time) at the end of Friday 29 June 2012.

Two of the department's First Year students, Tim Hollies and Andrew Sula have been successful in winning highly competitive scholarships from Asidua.

This scholarships will offer support as follows:

£1,000 per year for each of the scheduled academic years of the course; At least eight weeks paid summer work between each academic year; A guaranteed paid industrial placement in year three; After completion of industrial placement, the opportunity for paid part-time work during the academic year; Following an application for a permanent position and subject to success at interview, in accordance with Fair Employment legislation, a permanent position with Asidua after graduation. As a result, each scholarship is worth up to £25,000 to the successful candidates.

Asidua is a software consultancy and services company, headquartered in Belfast with engineering and sales offices in Birmingham and Dublin. It employs over 120 people. Asidua delivers world-class integration, software and consultancy services to government and corporate clients based in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, mainland Europe, USA and the Far East.

Scholars will get to work with very experienced individuals who mentor them in software engineering best practices, and will gain real world experience of working in teams and increase their confidence and communications skills. They will also gain a better understanding of what a career in IT is all about. Such work based learning or placement is invaluable for the student, as they will gain excellent industrial experience during their time with Asidua. Since they will work on real projects within the Company, this will increase their chance of employment following graduation.

More Information:
http://www.asidua.com/portal/careers/our-scholarships/scholarships-at-warwick-university/

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today the next winner in the New York City Applied Sciences Initiative.

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is an applied science research institute which will be a partnership of top institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly with a consortium of world-class universities including The University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, The City University of New York, The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and The University of Toronto. Industry partners include IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Con Edison, National Grid, Xerox, Arup, IDEO, and AECOM.

Warwick Computer Science will play a significant role in CUSP, with new and existing academics providing research and teaching in areas including operations research, service computing, complexity theory, networking and communications, data analytics, modelling and visualisation.

The completed institute will host 50 faculty and researchers and over 500 masters-level and PhD students. Students and staff from Warwick Computer Science will be able to engage in urban sciences projects in the New York ‘living lab’, in areas including smart buildings, digital healthcare, transport solutions, and public safety.

The Centre will open its doors to its first class of Warwick-CUSP students in September 2013.

For more information see:

1. http://www.nycedc.com/press-release/mayor-bloomberg-new-york-university-president-sexton-and-mta-chairman-lhota-announce
2. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_only_european/
3. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/04/urban-science-centre-born-in-the-big-apple.html

Last week a training day was held in the Department for ICT/Computing teachers interested in starting GCSE Computing in their school. While all the main Boards are offering this qualification we were pleased to have our opening talk from the Chief Examiner for the OCR GCSE Computing, Sean O'Byrne. It became typical of the whole day, that even in this first session, many participants (30 teachers or advisors) interjected with vigorous, sometimes critical, questioning and discussion. It was an intense day with sessions on practical sorting activities at KS3, on programming (Scratch and Greenfoot), on the potential of on-line support especially for programming, and on what to do next! Two major themes that emerged were:

(i) problems associated with the assessment of programming tasks and the kinds of teacher intervention and support that are allowable and desirable,

(ii) how should teachers new to programming choose and learn languages suited to the GCSE and suited to students gaining valuable concepts for future work in computing.

There was a huge range of experience among those present: some had been on the OCR pilot scheme already for two years, others were committed to starting the GCSE this September, some had industry experience of programming, others no programming knowledge at all. The day proved a good success for most participants (judging by the detailed feedback) and will result in our setting up a dedicated schools portal (soon) and preparing to offer further CPD training for teachers this July.

Nick Pope successfully completed his PhD entitled "Supporting the Migration from Construal to Program: Rethinking Software Development" under the supervision of Dr Meurig Beynon. His thesis is both a significant contribution to Empirical Modelling research, and a vigorous critique and reappraisal of some of its established principles and tools.

Where previous EM research highlighted the role of families of definitions in developing construals Nick has proposed a richer framework in which to conceptualise the transition from construals to programs. In his vision, the current state of a construal is expressed by a single binary function of the form ϕ: R × R → R that changes dynamically.

His work draws on ideas from prototype-based object-oriented software development and functional programming that have been the basis of practical tools and models first deployed in Warwick Games Design Society. Nick is currently working on the development of a web-based EM tool that will integrate his own distinctive contribution with those of many other graduates from the EM research group.

Nick's independent spirit has not only been evident in his research contribution: he spends as much time as possible trekking, ski-ing, cycling and mountaineering. At the time of writing Nick is believed to be scaling some 4000m peaks in Morocco.

February sees the launch of the ROADBLOCK project, funded by the EPSRC with the goal of developing artificial and programmable bacterial coatings to protect surfaces against infective agents. While Bioengineering techniques that allow genes to be manipulated have been around for some time, the discipline of Synthetic Biology allows for the more effective design of genetic circuits. The Principle Investigator for this project is Dr Sara Kalvala, who will be applying her expertise in Compiler Design and Formal Logics towards the development of tools which will help assemble genetic networks and model their interactions with host genes.

The Department invites applications for a Research Fellowship to work on this three-year project. The project requires a post-doctoral researcher with a good background in Computer Science, especially in either Compiler Design or Automated Reasoning, who would like to expand their horizons and apply their knowledge into Synthetic Biology.

More information and details of the application procedure are available from http://go.warwick.ac.uk/kalvala/pdra. The deadline for applications is 27 February 2012.